Preserving the status unequal.

Sometimes I feel a little bit Marxist about Brazil, even though I’m not entirely sure what that means and haven’t read Das Kapital.  However, working on the possibly mistaken assumption that a Marxist critique entails laying bare the economic and social forces which define and oppress individuals, here is a brief account of why Brazil really pisses me off at times.

First of all, the cleaning products don’t clean very well. This may not sound like much, but someone once suggested to me that the reason for keeping these products so shitty is the assumption that the serving classes don’t deserve any better. Indeed, the fact that they require the people who use them to work harder simply to achieve the same results is, according to this hypothesis, an advantage, since it helps to keep them ‘in their place’.

I would never have believed this if I hadn’t recently found an electric vacuum broom (pictured) for sale in an electronics shop.

This seems to me to epitomise the extent of Brazil’s attachment to the preservation of the status quo, or status unequal. Having picked one of these devices up, I can testify that it is excessively heavy and almost certainly (due to the necessity of hefting it up and down) less efficient than similarly priced alternatives such as a vacuum roller or a cheap vacuum cleaner. The only conceivable reason for choosing this device, then, is that it corresponds with the accepted iconography of cleaning in this country. That is to say, people at every level expect this section of society to do hard menial work, and to accept the signifiers of this hard menial work with pathetic gratitude, because that is what ‘they’ are born to and deserve. The fact that many of the people who do this work seem to have no expectation beyond this is heartbreaking, as is the inability of educated, wealthy people to prevent themselves from perpetuating such profound inequality.

Now, I have had occasion in the past to tease Eliana, our cleaning lady, on twitter. The story of how we came to have a cleaning lady is simple: I tried to do it myself, but was rubbish; I tried to clean the floor with wax and my wife came home to find me rocking back and forth amid the carnage. However, to return to Eliana, my teasing of her is only done on the basis that I both respect and like her, and that she knows she can tease me back, as equals, which she frequently does. I also flatter myself to think that our flat provides her with a pleasantly different environment from those in which she normally works, one in which she can be herself and have a laugh. Certainly she’s told me that of all the places where she works, ours is her favourite, and I really appreciate her saying this, since it implies that she doesn't just regard me as a pushover gringo around whom she can run circles of ever-increasing work avoidance. I also remember Eliana once telling me that she only does this extra cleaning work (her main source of income being to clean at my wife’s school) in order to save enough money so that her daughter won't have to use ‘these’ (she gestured at this point to the broom and dustpan she was holding) when she grows up.

My point is that Eliana is manifestly a person with the same concerns and instincts as me. She believes in social justice. She sees the problems in her situations and how they derive from the way her country is organised. She wants to give her daughter a better future than her own. And she is political - she voted for Dilma and hopes that the country’s first female president will improve conditions both for the poor and women. However, the society she lives in does not seem inclined to listen to the voice of Eliana, or the millions like her. Now, armchair socialists such as myself, who go on the occasional protest march and salve our consciences with direct debits to the third world, don’t often have to listen to the voices of real people who suffer and struggle and carry on working without complaint. The country I am from almost unilaterally affords its population enough comfort to forget what true poverty is, or the fact that it still festers even now in neglected margins and up forgotten lanes. We are content to take our vitamins and worry about our next pay rise and talk in benign generalities about the invisible, inaudible and primarily hypothetical mass of suffering humanity which has less than we do. So it's a radical shock to meet people who are actually living through this stuff and yet who feel, with acuteness and urgency, the desire for a better system.

Of course, Eliana would be scandalised to hear herself described as poor. She is more fortunate than many, and grateful for what she has. But she is nonetheless the product of Brazilian inequality, and it is in the received behaviours of her socio-economic milieu which these differences become visible. For example, she won’t use a mop and bucket to clean our floor, preferring instead to use a gigantic squeegee wiper with floor cloths precariously pinned to it. I used to work in a hotel where one of my jobs was mopping and waxing the dance floor, and so I speak from some experience when I say that using a mop is better than her system (which I’ve also tried). As with the vacuum broom, Eliana’s squeegee makes you work harder for less results. Another telling moment came last week when we had some work being done upstairs. As a result, Eliana couldn’t clean up there, and she was frustrated that she was going to have to leave her work undone. I told her it was OK, I’d do it after everyone had gone. Eliana looked worried, ‘But Matt,’ she said with timorous voice, ‘do you know how to clean?’*

As I implied above, the blame for situations like this cannot entirely be laid at the door of those who benefit from the current system; after all, it is not an easy process to renounce the particular behaviours which society has instilled in you according to the status dictated by your birth, etc. No, the responsibility for reducing the poverty gap, for the benefit of all parties, must ultimately lie with the government: it is their job to create the better education and fairer economic practices which will extend opportunity throughout society. That caveat in place, however, it must also be said that we have encountered portions of the upper and middle classes who seem only too happy to reinforce this unfair system via some fairly unforgivable, and surprisingly unapologetic, demonstrations of prejudice. This isn’t the UK, remember, where people conceal their unsavoury beliefs beneath a correct façade of received opinion until reassured that they're in the right sort of company or have taken too much drink. We have heard of friends being told not to date black men because ‘we’ don’t do that sort of thing, and seen the naked assumptions made in bars and offices and shops against anyone with a darker skin or the look of poverty about them, the wrong clothes, the cheap make-up. We are also occasionally treated to the unlikely sight of well-heeled women attended by their chauffeurs as they go shopping down the São Paulo equivalent of Jermyn Street for their functionaries’ uniforms. This highly visible demarcation of the serving and served has surely not been seen in Britain since the Second World War, and it’s deeply uncomfortable to be around the exercise of such entitlement.

Finally, I want to mention elevators, because that’s always the best way to end a polemic. Specifically, most condos in Brazil have two elevators, one service elevator and one regular elevator. Until fairly recently these elevators were segregated so that all the cleaning staff had to travel in the shitty elevator (bear in mind that most flats have a service toilet, and some also have a service entrance and a maid’s sleeping palette for live-in servitude). However, in the eighties or nineties, a law came into effect which, in theory, forbade this segregation. Nowadays maids and service staff can use the main elevator (which has a mirror, and is therefore essential for Eliana, who is incredibly vain) – only many of them won’t. A lot of people who’ve come up to our flat delivering stuff or whatever insist on using the other lift when they leave.

For a long time, I thought this was just reflexively adopted humility, a hangover from the days of segregation. But when a guy came over to help us with our floor last week, he refused to take the posher elevator. I told him that he should, it was OK, but he said ‘No, no, in this building they don’t like it.’ This faced me with another uncomfortable truth: that the doormen in our building are enforcing a segregation which is not only unjust but illegal. You might be forgiven for thinking that a porter – like a waiter or a receptionist – might feel a natural empathy and desire to emancipate people who have only a little less than themselves. But it seems that quite the opposite is true: in a reversal of all our liberal humanist expectations, the allegiance of these groups is directed upwards, to the people whose fortunes they defend, maintain and covet. This in turn bears out the unsavoury truth that in an unjust society every social strata above the lowest is content and perhaps even relieved to have someone to oppress and thereby vindicate the perception of their own innate superiority. It also means that the cleaning ladies who take the main elevator are facing down prejudice on a daily basis, which is very brave, but also very sad, because they simply shouldn’t have to.

I try and imagine their lives sometimes, from my rich man’s ghetto, when I pass the crowds at the bus stops in a taxi or the aqueous underwater faces of people crammed onto night buses. I try and imagine them heading out to the far peripheries of the city, where the favelas are, those glowing nests of light wavering on the horizon, the hills an imagined darkness behind. I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t like to think of these people being dismissed from the unforgivable luxury of our houses and apartments, making the long and thankless journey out to where the roads are potholed and everything in the shops is cheap, like ghosts absolved from our consciences, vanishing into a world it is too convenient to forget. 

*Actually, Eliana said, ‘But Sir Matt, do you know how to clean?’, “Sir Matt” being what she calls me. I rather like the noble ring it has to it, and have taken to calling her Dona Eliana in return, so we sound like a couple of extras from Don Quixote.)